There were so many huge, consequential stories in 2017, and they
all came at a breakneck pace, one after another. The news cycle
was so quick that many stories that would have otherwise made a
massive impact either were forgotten soon after they broke, or
fell by the wayside entirely.

Here are 17 consequential news stories from 2017 that you might
have missed, but should definitely remember:

The Pentagon's $22 million UFO investigation program

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Screengrab from a Department of Defense video showing a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object.

Initially pushed for by Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the program
interviewed pilots and military officers who had encounters with
unexplained objects over the years. Intelligence official Luis
Elizondo led it, and told The New York Times that
he resigned in October because he said the Defense Department
didn't take his findings seriously.

Essentially, the US military was studying whether aliens existed.
Aliens!

1 million people contracting cholera in Yemen

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A man infected with cholera lies on a bed at a cholera treatment center in Sanaa, Yemen

source

Thomson Reuters

Yemen's
cholera outbreak, which started in 2016, has grown at an
alarming pace amid the country's ongoing civil war.

In December, the Red Cross confirmed that
1 million people in the country have contracted the disease,
an astronomical number considering it is treatable and
preventable.

But the conflict in Yemen has led to a perfect storm that has
allowed the disease to flourish.

Puerto Rico burning the dead after Hurricane Maria

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A mountain of rubble remains in front of a house in Morovis, Puerto Rico on Dec. 21, 2017.

source

AP Photo/Carlos Giusti

While the official number of deaths in Puerto Rico that have
occurred as a result of Hurricane Maria sits only at 64, at least 1,052 people have
died in the aftermath of the hurricane.

They weren't included in the official
death toll because their bodies were not examined to
determine the cause of death. The government had also allowed
funeral homes to burn the bodies of the dead to cut down on
burial costs.

While Puerto Rico dominated the headlines as the Category 4 storm
ravaged the island, the US territory's woes have only grown as
the news cycle moved on.
As much as half of the island's people remain without power
over three months after the disaster.

A Croat war criminal's suicide by poison during his trial at the Hague

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A wartime commander of Bosnian Croat forces, Slobodan Praljak, is seen drinking poison during a hearing at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

source

Thomson Reuters

Slobodan Praljak was a commander in the Bosnian Croat forces
fighting in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. In 2013, he was
convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced
to 20 years in prison.

During an appeal trial at the UN's International Court of Justice
at The Hague in November, Praljak's sentence was reaffirmed.

"Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal! I reject your judgment
with contempt!" Praljak shouted in the court room.

Then he suddenly drank a vial of potassium cyanide. Praljak was
rushed to the hospital, where died a few hours later.

Trump's conflicts of interest

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Flanked by his family, Trump holds up a ribbon during the grand opening ceremony of the Trump International Hotel-Old Post Office, in Washington on Oct. 26, 2016.

source

Associated Press/Evan Vucci

A story that often took center stage during the 2016 presidential
campaign but faded under the mountain of news in 2017 was Trump's
various conflicts of interest.

Among them are the Trump Organization's
continued lease for the Trump International Hotel in
Washington, DC, which sits in a federal building, and pending
trademark applications for his brand in China.

Obama-era holdover
Walter Shaub resigned as director of the Office of Government
Ethics in July, and has since said "Trump's 'half blind
trust' is totally bogus."

Trump's financial interests have also
come up in the investigation into whether his campaign colluded
with Russia during the election.

Obama letting Hezbollah off the hook in order to secure the Iran deal

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Lebanese Hezbollah supporters carry a replica of Hezbollah emblem during a religious procession to mark Ashura in Beirut's southern suburbs.

source

Thomson Reuters

A Politico
investigation detailed how the Obama administration sidelined
a campaign to stop Iran-funded Hezbollah's drug trafficking in
Latin America in order to secure the Iran deal.

The effort, called Project Cassandra, had been active since 2008
and focused on the Lebanese terror group's international crime
operations, which included drug and weapons smuggling.

Despite numerous leads, according to Politico, the Obama
administration refused to work with the project on numerous
occassions, allegedly delaying or hindering progress in their
efforts to file criminal charges against a host of institutions
linked to Hezbollah and Iran.

Politico's sources allege these decisions were part of a policy
by the administration.

The terrorist attack that killed over 300 people in Egypt

On November 24, Islamist militants
surrounded a Sufi mosque compound in the town of Bir al-Abed
in North Sinai governorate in Egypt, set off a bomb, and then
shot
fleeing worshippers in what became the single deadliest
terrorist attack in Egypt's history - 305 people died.

The attack was likely perpetrated by jihadist militants fighting
in the sparsely populated eastern region of the country, where
many fighters have ties to ISIS. Despite the enormous death toll
though, the event quickly faded from Western media shortly after
it took place.

But it was not an isolated incident. Just this week, militants
killed 10
Coptic Christians in the city of Helwan, and have been actively
carrying out
attacks across the country for several years.

The continued rise of American militias

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Militia members run through shooting drills

source

REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

Militias, certainly ones of the anti-government variety, are
nothing new in the United States. Since the 1990s the number of
militias has fluctuated, but generally, militias rise under
Democratic administrations and decline under Republican ones.

This has
not been true under Trump, though. There are 500 militia
groups in the US today - more than double the number in 2008,
according to a
PBS report citing the Anti-Defamation League.

Many hold right-wing, conspiratorial, or anti-immigrant views,
and see Trump's presidency as a
good thing. But many militia members say they believe there
are enough threats to his vision that disarming now wouldn't be a
good idea.

Monsoon floods that killed 1,200 people and left a third of Bangladesh underwater

While Americans' attention was turned toward the flooding in
Houston from Hurricane Harvey, massive record-breaking
floods were also wreaking havoc in South Asia.

In late August and early September, monsoon rains pounded
Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, killing over 1,200 people and
leaving millions either stranded or displaced.

By early September, as much as
a third of Bangladesh was underwater, and aid agencies were
scrambling to provide assistance for a flooding disaster unseen
in years.

Trump's long-term judicial impact

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Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swears in Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C.

source

White House/Shealah Craighead

Trump made headlines with his
nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court, but he
has also been quietly remaking the American court system.

He's been nominating numerous judges to federal district and
appeals courts across the country, and the Republican-controlled
Senate has also been doing its best to confirm them at a
rapid-fire pace.

Trump's quick nomination rate has backfired on several occasions.
A few of his picks have withdrawn themselves from consideration,
including an
Alabama lawyer who never tried a case before.

As he continues to fill posts, Trump is poised to have a
significant impact on the entire American court system.

While the fighting didn't last long,
100,000 people fled the city, and the battle resulted in at
least
several casualties. The event did not have the far-reaching
consequences some analysts had predicted it might have, but was
an important phase in the reunification of Iraq following ISIS's
ouster earlier this year that was quickly forgotten afterward.

The arrest of Reuters journalists who uncovered mass graves in Myanmar

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Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo pose for a picture at the Reuters office in Yangon, Myanmar.

source

Thomson Reuters

Two Burmese journalists were
arrested by authorities in Myanmar after reportedly
uncovering evidence of mass graves in the village of Inn Din,
where ethnic Rohingya Muslims were allegedly targeted by the
military and Buddhist civilians.

The Burmese military said it was investigating claims of war
crimes by its soldiers, but maintained that reporters Wa Lone and
Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested for trying to illegally obtain
information about Rakhine state where the Rohingya are
concentrated.

The news came months after continued reports of
ethnic cleansing being perpetrated against the Rohingya
population in Rakhine.

The Department of Justice demand for information on all visitors to an anti-Trump resistance website

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

source

Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

The Department of Justice
demanded that the anti-Trump site Dreamhost hand over
information on all 1.3 million visitors to its site to the
federal government in connection to protests that took place
during Trump's inauguration in January.

The war in Ukraine is still happening, and shows no signs of ending anytime soon

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Smoke and flames rise over a warehouse storing ammunition for multiple rocket launcher systems at a military base in the town of Kalynivka.

source

Thomson Reuters

The war in Eastern Ukraine, also called the War in Donbas, has
been grinding on ever since the end of 2014, and although it
rarely makes US headlines, it is still
no closer to stopping.

Today, rather than troop movements and urban battles, the war in
the region consists mainly or intermittent shelling and a frozen
frontline - along with an ever-present sense of dread among local
inhabitants.

There was also an
internal shakeup this year among the Russian-backed rebels
based in Luhansk, which, along with Donetsk, is one of two major
cities under rebel control in the country.

Amid the various other stories, conflicts, and events that took
center stage in 2017, it has been easy to forget that there is
still an active war taking place between Russian-backed
separatists and the Ukrainian government within Europe's borders.

The assault of anti-Erdogan protestors by the Turkish president's bodyguards in Washington, DC

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A view of a protest that turned violent outside the Turkish embassy in Washington D.C., May 16, 2017.

When demonstrators protesting against Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's policies showed up at the Turkish embassy in
Washington, DC in May, they were met by the president's
bodyguards, who proceeded to
violently assault them.

The incident sparked a tit-for-tat between the US and Turkey,
with American authorities seeking swift and strong action against
the Turkish bodyguards.

In response, Ankara gave the US ambassador in Turkey a stern
letter protesting the actions. DC authorities eventually
charged the bodyguards with felony aggravated assault, among
other crimes.

A Philadelphia Eagles defensive end donated his salary to fund scholarships for underprivileged youth

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Chris Long during his time playing for the New England Patriots.

source

Maddie Meyer/Getty

Eagles defensive end Chris Long
donated the salary from his first six games of the season to
fund scholarships for kids in his hometown of Charlottesville,
Virginia.

And after that, he decided he wanted to donate the pay for his
remaining 10 games, too.

Long used the salary for his last 10 games to launch an
initiative called Pledge 10 for Tomorrow to
promote education equity and opportunity in the three cities he
has played in - Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia.

He says he has received in donations from fans and fellow
players, too. The organization has since raised over $929,000.

Former President Barack Obama tweeted
that this was one of his favorite overlooked news stories from
2017.